Three Tennis Balls

For six weeks I practiced in my bedroom with three tennis balls. I did it with the door shut, after everybody was asleep. I dropped the balls about four hundred times. Our apartment is above the laundromat on Ninth Street, so nobody heard anything.

Then, on Sunday, my little sister found the balls under my bed.

At dinner my dad put down his fork. “Dax,” he said. “Show us this juggling thing.”

I stood up next to the table. My hands were wet. I threw the first ball, then the second, and then all three balls were on the floor.

“That was fast,” my sister said.

The second time was worse. One ball went into the salad. My mom moved the glasses to the other end of the table and told me to keep going.

I closed my eyes for a second. Focus, I thought. Just the balls, nothing else.

Then I threw them again, and this time they went around. One, two, three, one, two, three. My sister counted out loud to fourteen before I dropped them, and everybody was clapping and shouting, and my dad was the loudest.

“Six weeks?” he said. “In your room? On your own?”

“Yeah.”

He got up and pushed his chair back against the wall, and then he pushed my mom’s chair back too. “Practice out here,” he said.